OK Cupid did a statistical analysis of their uses and divided them into two categories by gender (I don't know what they did with nonbinary, bigender, agender, or genderfluid users). They then listed the Users by Age and checked out what age group they most commonly sought. Here's the chart for women:

Yup. No matter his age, he's always looking for a 20 something. The highest they get is 24 and that's on -average-. Unless every 36 year old guy is looking for a 20 year old you're looking at a range of ages... And 18 is the lowest the website allows.

This is a big part of why TV shows casting 20 year old actresses for 15 year old characters and 40 year old characters bugs me so much. It gives people unreasonable expectations in both directions.

And Barely Legal Porn? SUPER fucking creepy. Like... You couldn't wait a year or two to see them tits. Gotta get 'em as young as possible... ew. I've got a feeling if the industry's minimum age were lowered there'd still be a big fucking audience for Barely Legal porn of 15 year old girls...

But now I have to ask: Who was surprised by the differences between the two charts and why were you surprised? If you weren't surprised, what does that mean, on a sociological basis that you expected women to mostly go for men close their own age and men to aim almost exclusively for young women, often less than half their age?

(I don't know what they did with nonbinary, bigender, agender, or genderfluid users).

OKCupid only very recently included these categories. There was an article about it on the 18th. As such they wouldn't have any data for these yet.

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If you weren't surprised, what does that mean, on a sociological basis that you expected women to mostly go for men close their own age and men to aim almost exclusively for young women, often less than half their age?

I'm not convinced it is a sociological phenomenon. Chart these ages against maximum reproductive viability by sex on average and you'll see evolution's smudgy fingerprints on this one.

It's also worth noting that the charts don't reflect who people actually message; men tend to message women younger than themselves but the cut-off is around 10 years at most.

So the 50 year old men may consider 20-22 year old women to be the most attractive (although I note this is based on who's liking who tool... considering the number of fake profiles on OKCupid there's no guarantee that the photo attached to a "20 year old" profile actually shows a 20 year old) they're generally messaging 40 year olds.

You have that back to front, Steampunkette. You are claiming, one would assume, that there is a mixture of evolutionary and sociological factors at play, Caehlim is claiming evolutionary. You're adding stuff to the model, not him.

That's not entirely true, Kythia. I proposed it in the OP as a sociological function based on how women are presented in the media (which is harmful to both men and women).

It was Caehlim who attempted to reduce it to Evolution.

However we also live in a world where we know that Evolution often has fuckall to do with whether a mate is "Best" or not due to Social Selection of traits. It's why peacocks have big and grand ultimately pointless tails. They don't help him to fly or hunt or anything -but- mate. It's an extreme example of social sexual selection but it is there.

And yes. It did have an evolutionary impact. But it was a Social Decision which had Evolutionary Results, not a survivability trait.

Will Social desirability of young women evolve us into a species where women don't live but 25 years and then die out? Of course not. But it does result in a society where many women choose to appear younger than they are, lie about their age, or undergo plastic surgery to alter their physical appearance. And remember: Trans women exist and have our own sexual desirability which still is considered capped at 20.

As for when women with vaginas hit their reproductive peak: 8-14. We call it 20 because of social implications, but as soon as a girl's eggs have started dropping she's, according to biology, ready to start producing kids. And doing so, that early, will jumpstart her physiology to a point where she "Matures" more rapidly (due to hormone shifts). It can also kill her, but evolution isn't really worried about that: Society is.

If evolution was worried about that women with vaginas wouldn't start ovulating until 20ish, so their physical alterations were more or less complete and their chances of surviving childbirth were at their highest.

So, again, it's easy to just say "Oh, it's evolution" and shrug one's shoulders. But there are many factors at play that impact evolution and socialization is one of them. Not all men are attracted to big assess or huge tits or black, white, hispanic, or japanese women. But the majority of them (according to websites like this which catalogue hundreds of thousands of men) like women as young as possible.

So it behooves us to try and find out what is socialization and what is biological. Such a trial would be rightly unethical. So change the socialization and see if the change expected occurs on a societal level is the best we can hope for.

That's not entirely true, Kythia. I proposed it in the OP as a sociological function based on how women are presented in the media (which is harmful to both men and women).

Your hypothesis does not sufficiently explain the global presence of this phenomenon both across the globe and throughout history. Sociological functions are by definition found within a particular society. The parallel development of this across all human cultures would involve either a reaction to an external stimulus that is universal or a reaction to an internal stimulus of common genetic influence (or possibly both I suppose).

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It was Caehlim who attempted to reduce it to Evolution.

While you attempted to reduce it to Sociology. I don't understand why one is automatically correct by mere assertion and the other automatically false. I appreciate that Ethology has a bad rap and has had a few fairly ugly participants in it (social darwinists and racists leap rapidly to mind), however it can still be a valid scientific approach to determining causes of patterns of behaviour.

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Trans women exist and have our own sexual desirability which still is considered capped at 20.

I'm not sure where you're getting this data from, it was not within your original dataset. As I mentioned earlier, OKCupid has only recently broken out of the gender binary model (within the last few days).

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If evolution was worried about that women with vaginas wouldn't start ovulating until 20ish, so their physical alterations were more or less complete and their chances of surviving childbirth were at their highest.

Evolution doesn't worry about anything, nor does it function towards a desired goal. Peaks of localized optimals tend to 'trap' evolution, preventing development towards a more optimal situation when any single allele shift will result in a less optimal phenotype.

I haven't proposed any course of action, not even shrugging of shoulders. I'm merely disagreeing with your assessment of the cause of this phenomenon and answering your direct question: "If you weren't surprised, what does that mean, on a sociological basis that you expected women to mostly go for men close their own age and men to aim almost exclusively for young women, often less than half their age?"

I indicated this by quoting the question directly previous to my reply.

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So it behooves us to try and find out what is socialization and what is biological. Such a trial would be rightly unethical. So change the socialization and see if the change expected occurs on a societal level is the best we can hope for.

Actually this is a commonly studied field which finds ways to perform ethical studies on human attraction.

For example, to quote from the abstract of Kenrick, Douglas T.; Gabrielidis, Christina; Keefe, Richard C,; and Cornelius, Jeffrey S. Adolescents' Age Preferences for Dating Partners: Support for an evolutionary model of Life-History Strategies. Child Development, 1996, 67, 1499-1511.

"The tendency for women to prefer older partners, and for men to prefer younger partners, has frequently been explained in terms of socialization to American sex-role norms specifying that men must be older and more powerful than their female partners. However recent cross-cultural data reveal this same pattern in all societies studied, a finding more in line with an evolutionary life-history model. The evolutionary model assumes that what is attractive to males is not youth, per se, but features related to fertility.

This perspective leads to a hypothesis concerning the development of age preferences among adolescents: teenage males should violate the normative pattern shown in adult males and express interest in females older than themselves. 209 teenagers (103 males, 106 females) ranging in age from 12 to 19 were surveyed regarding the age limits they would find acceptable in a dating partner they would find ideally attractive.

Although teenage males were willing to date girls slightly younger than themselves, they indicated a much wider range of acceptability above their own ages, and also reported that their ideally attractive partners would be several years older than themselves. Preferences of teenage females were similar in pattern to those of adult females, ranging, on average, from their own age to several years older. When combined with the consistent adult data obtained from numerous cultures, these data suggest the utility of viewing the development of sex differences in mate preference from the perspective of an evolutionary life-history model."

Media is pervasive in our lives and has been for centuries on end. It shapes and alters our perceptions of reality. There are people alive today who earnestly argue that the Pharoahs were white dudes.

Jesus Christ himself is almost invariably portrayed in paintings and movies as a white dude with high cheekbones, long wavy brown hair, and a close cut beard. And he has been since around 800AD.

From artwork to plays to handbills and penny dreadfuls on up to television and movies, media has had a huge impact on the world. And cross-cultural, too, thanks to England invading EVERYTHING. "The Sun Never Sets on the British Empire" was a saying for a reason. They imposed their cultural norms, language, and media on people from America to China (and not just across the Pacific, either, though it is a shorter distance!)

And yes, many cultures took what the British brought and adapted it to their culture, but few if any threw away everything the Brits brought, from Political Theory to Foreign Concepts. And it's not like it was -just- England, either. Spain, France, and Portugal all did the same thing and all of them were, to some degree or another, linked through shared media. Shakespeare's plays may only have played in the Globe Theatre in the late 1500s, but by the 1800s his plays were being performed across Europe and around the world, translated into half a dozen languages. And of those only England is nearly as bad as Rome was at creating a monoculture, since it wound up forming the basis for almost every European society moving forward with shared language, coinage, sharing of ideas and plays and poetry and stories...

Bring it forward into the 20th century and you've got three of the most pervasive forms of media available, to date, which are constantly surrounding people in what is now known as Western Culture, rather than specifically British or European. Because while there may be cultural differences, here or there, we share much of the same monoculture, these days, through Movies, TV, and the Internet.

The last one being the most egregious of the bunch. Not that it's bad, it's just that it's the one that does it the most effectively.

Media has been affecting our cultural perspectives across borders and oceans since before people thought that the four humors determined health.

Sorry. Didn't realize I didn't explain that all out in the thread. I did in the dozen PMs I got about this thread from several posters who were confused by what I meant.

We know for a fact that social pressures can drive sexual selection. It's why peacocks have big freaking tails that only serve to signal the male is a decent mate for a peahen. At some point the peahens started breeding more often with the peacocks who had the bigger, prettier, tail and evolution took it's course after that.

Could sexual selection based on age be a biological evolutionary trait encoded into half the population? Maybe, but it's doubtful. Because like we both noted evolution doesn't care.

Redheads are essentially endangered at this point. We're breeding them out. For many (mostly white) guys, though, Redheads are sexy as hell. It's obviously not an advantageous trait for sexual selection, since it's going extinct, but there are a hell of a lot of dudes who find it sexy as hell. Are they biologically predisposed to redheads or is it a social expectation?

Guys like tits, right? I mean, evolutionarily speaking. But there's so much variety in what shape or size that a given dude might be interested in. Same thing with skin tones, hair colors, eye colors, shape and size of the backside, and overall body type. How many of those are biological and if they're evolutionary preferences why is there so much variety? If it's biological then maybe what we're looking at is dozens or even hundreds of different evolutionary lines coming to the fore.

But regardless of evolutionary background all of these dudes wants women who are young. Regardless of their age relative to their partner's age, they want a 20-something.

If there is so much variety in sexual preference based on biology, why is the sexual preference unilateral on age? Shouldn't ALL men want women with a thick body type, wide hips, and large breasts for childrearing based on what is most evolutionary advantageous, preferably with dark skin and dark hair since that's the most common (and therefore successful) biological trait?

But they don't. They want body types that are relative to their cultural and social background with some level of homogeneity brought on by mass media linking many basic pieces of western culture which has been thoroughly integrated into every other society on some level or another.

As for evolution being handwavey and shouldershrugging... It really is when I'm discussing a social issue and the implications of it. Even if it's not intended to be, stating that the reasons behind this "Have evolution's fingerprints" all over it really does come across as being dismissive and reductive of the question posed about the sociological underpinnings.

From artwork to plays to handbills and penny dreadfuls on up to television and movies, media has had a huge impact on the world. And cross-cultural, too, thanks to England invading EVERYTHING. "The Sun Never Sets on the British Empire" was a saying for a reason. They imposed their cultural norms, language, and media on people from America to China (and not just across the Pacific, either, though it is a shorter distance!)

I absolutely agree on the pervasive influence of media as a huge social phenomenon with massive and wide-reaching implications. I'm sorry to snip out so much of your examples and argument there, because I agree with all of it and it's very good. But people can just scroll up and read it on your post.

However anthropologists continue to find evidence of this age-discrepancy even in relatively isolated cultures. There's evidence of it existing in traditional Australian Aboriginal culture, despite a 40,000 year period of mostly isolation before the British invasion. There's evidence of it in the strongly independent and western resistant cannibals of Papua New Guinea.

I don't think media is, at present, responsible for this phenomenon. Although they certainly do enhance it and certainly don't do enough to reshape it.

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Redheads are essentially endangered at this point.

I know you hear this one a lot, but it's actually an urban myth that's been spread about a lot. This isn't actually true.

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Are they biologically predisposed to redheads or is it a social expectation?

I have no data on this. If I had to guess, I would expect this one is completely social related to its rarity and concepts of the sexualization of exotic appearance. However this is purely a guess.

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Guys like tits, right? I mean, evolutionarily speaking.

I was fond of them up until teething, certainly. (Just a joke, I know what you mean).

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But there's so much variety in what shape or size that a given dude might be interested in. Same thing with skin tones, hair colors, eye colors, shape and size of the backside, and overall body type. How many of those are biological and if they're evolutionary preferences why is there so much variety?

The studies I'm aware of suggest that these are actually determined by social expectation and are not strongly biological in appeal with some exception on the shape and size of the backside (mostly related to the position of the calf muscles relative to the backside rather than an actual size preference).

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If there is so much variety in sexual preference based on biology, why is the sexual preference unilateral on age?

I'm not sure why you expect it not to be. Why are peahens so attracted to specific preferences regarding the ocelli of their partners? Why do sexually successful peacocks all look so similar in the appearance of their train? If this is consistent between Afropavo congensis, Pavo muticus and Pavo cristatus why would small sub-groupings of Homo Sapiens display significant variation?

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Shouldn't ALL men want women with a thick body type, wide hips, and large breasts for childrearing based on what is most evolutionary advantageous, preferably with dark skin and dark hair since that's the most common (and therefore successful) biological trait?

Actually most studies on attraction show that it's other female traits which are universally perceived as attractive between cultures. Usually related to the shape of the jawline and a few other traits which are very accurate indicators of Estrogen within the body. These show extraordinary levels of conformity in cross-cultural studies. Remember the risks in assuming that evolution will favour a perfect match, instead we usually end up with a "close enough" situation. It's dangerous to reason backwards from "this would be advantageous" to "therefore it would have been selected for within the evolutionary process".

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But they don't. They want body types that are relative to their cultural and social background with some level of homogeneity brought on by mass media linking many basic pieces of western culture which has been thoroughly integrated into every other society on some level or another.

Many of these studies deliberately focus on areas of developing countries with limited access to mass media, specifically to account for these variations.

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Even if it's not intended to be, stating that the reasons behind this "Have evolution's fingerprints" all over it really does come across as being dismissive and reductive of the question posed about the sociological underpinnings.

The question was phrased scientifically, so I gave you the answer best supported by the evidence with which I'm familiar. (I'm sorry for not presenting more of an argument in my initial post, but I didn't think it was entirely relevant and didn't expect quite so much attention on my comment, it was more presented in passing as a minor pedantic point). I don't agree with the science of your argument and so I can't really support it. I'm open to having my mind changed on this point, but I'll need more evidence. I may certainly be wrong, but I think on this forum it's best to present opposing viewpoints when you possess one. However if this is derailing the thread from its original purpose, then I do apologize and will withdraw my point as irrelevant.

I hope my presence on other threads has demonstrated that I support female rights and being attracted to males rather than females I think demonstrates that I'm not motivated by any defensive motivations. I just believe in scientific accuracy and in this case, from my own personal understanding and experience, I tend to favour a different scientific explanation.

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Jesus Christ himself is almost invariably portrayed in paintings and movies as a white dude with high cheekbones, long wavy brown hair, and a close cut beard. And he has been since around 800AD.

There's quite a convincing argument that Jesus Christ's current appearance is based off of Alexander the great. (long story, tracing a sequence of artwork back to a statue of Zeus that was one of the wonders of the ancient world, now lost but said to have been based on the appearance of Alexander). Not that this is relevant to anything, but I just found it an interesting enough piece of trivia to share.

That is a very interesting tidbit of trivia. And while I accept your reasoning on most everything you have, there, I will contest one point:

Bias of the Viewer.

Anthropology has a really bad name among scientists (and especially sociologists) because of how badly it has, over the centuries, trampled over evidence to leap to a conclusion that supports their own cultural preconceptions, even to the point of altering evidence to support that conclusion.

So while I acknowledge it's possible that the age-bias exists in Aboriginal Australian Culture and in the relict populations of Papau New Guinea Cannibals I remain somewhat skeptical because of the source.

Not you, mind you. Anthropologists.

I mean, Chagnon's interactions with the Yanomami should be proof enough that there's still some serious issues going in with Anthropology, today, that really makes a lot of it's actions questionable. There are college courses specifically on the ethics and controversies that have plagued Anthropology since it's inception.

You have to take them to become an anthropologist. That's how badly it's been screwed up and how long that they need multiple college courses to cover it all.

I also want to apologize for implying that all men love boobs. There are plenty of gay men who don't find them sexually appealing as well as asexual men. I shouldn't have been so callous in my attempt to inject humor into the text.

Science aside, just because I believe this to be natural to the human condition does not mean that I think we should act upon it. As sentient, understanding and cognitive beings we have the ability to use the power of our mind to overcome instinct. We can employ empathy to understand how our actions influence other people and make decisions to act in better ways.

One reason why I argue this though, is I see in many of these discussions a tendency to use shame in order to harness these instincts. While this has been a common tool of coercion in the past, we can see its failures in competing with instinct in the abstinence-only sex education movement.

People who feel shame and judgement for any form of attraction cannot easily seek help or guidance for these issues. They are then left ill-equipped to understand and oppose these instincts, often left with cognitive dissonance and traumatic patterns of self-suppression.

A better model of understanding, I believe, is to acknowledge this as a caveman legacy that we can all work together to overcome and improve upon. Much as we find ways to handle anger and channel it to productive and constructive ends.

So while I acknowledge it's possible that the age-bias exists in Aboriginal Australian Culture and in the relict populations of Papau New Guinea Cannibals I remain somewhat skeptical because of the source.

The Australian Aborigines have, unfortunately, been victims of a lot of oppression which can include how anthropologists study them. Fortunately there is a lot of concern in Australian academia at the moment about this and there is a lot of work criticizing the assumptions of anthropologists studying aboriginal culture.

Despite this I haven't been able to find a single source, even one aboriginal who denies the existence of the "Tualcha Mura" custom of the Alyawarra people. A practice by which a young man (14-15) finds a woman of the same age and organizes an arranged "mother in law" partnership where the man will marry the woman's daughter once she reaches adulthood.

Nor can I find a single source (not even non-academic comments) that denies the average 14.6 year difference in age between aboriginal men and their wives.

The only criticisms I can find on the topic, are critiques of people's western ethnocentric biases in trying to ignore this cultural difference while studying aboriginals.

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I also want to apologize for implying that all men love boobs. There are plenty of gay men who don't find them sexually appealing as well as asexual men. I shouldn't have been so callous in my attempt to inject humor into the text.

Oh... I'm not suggesting we shame people who date younger women or are interested in doing so. Not at all. Well... Unless they're looking to date children, but that's a different issue.

If anything were to change I'd want it to change in the media. Shift the representation in stories and go from there. Stop casting 20-somethings to play the part of 15 year old girls. Stop casting 20-somethings to play 30 and 40 year old women.

It's always jarring when I look at a TV screen and the actress playing the daughter looks to be the same age as the actress playing her mother, y'know?

The damage to the dudes that are here has already been done. There's very little chance of erasing 20-50 years of social reinforcement, which is what I still believe it is. Yeah. No way I'd suggest trying to alter anyone's thought patterns, sexual preferences, or beliefs. Just the way that we, as a culture, express these things to avoid reinforcing the issue in the future.

If anything were to change I'd want it to change in the media. Shift the representation in stories and go from there. Stop casting 20-somethings to play the part of 15 year old girls. Stop casting 20-somethings to play 30 and 40 year old women.

So much of this! ^

I'm not sure if I'm correct as I'm no anthropologist but I've gotten the feeling over the years that society as a whole determines what is beautiful, from gender, to age, to shapes, to clothes. At one point, large funny wigs and ludicrous amounts of makeup were considered the height of fashion, amongst both men and women, now you're more likely to be laughed at rather than fawned over for even attempting such a style. There was even a time when white skin was considered more beautiful than black skin and people actually tried to change their natural colour just to attain this incredibly pointless goal.

Today, society has determined that beauty is nothing short of perfection, from body to hair to age to voice to clothes. I've watched so many friends hit rock bottom in pursuit of this, while those who actually achieved some measure of "perfection" ended up being more depressed than ever despite their "accomplishment".

Today, society has determined that beauty is nothing short of perfection, from body to hair to age to voice to clothes. I've watched so many friends hit rock bottom in pursuit of this, while those who actually achieved some measure of "perfection" ended up being more depressed than ever despite their "accomplishment".

I think this is interesting to explore from the individual point of view - of what is the driving motivation of someone who pursues "societal standards of beauty." Is it somehow an innate tendency to want to be beautiful in a way the society (media) defines? I tend to disagree with this idea.

Rather, I think many people who feel insecure about their appearance are actually themselves caught in a vicious cycle known as the comparison trap. You'll only feel insecure about things when you are actively setting those qualities as metrics of value. For example, I never notice what kind of shoes someone is wearing because it's not a priority for me, so I don't care about my shoes. On the other hand, another person may immediately notice someone's shoes during a conversation, and thus pay attention to the appearance of his/her shoes as well since it is a metric he/she pays attention to in others. As another example, I may pay a lot of attention to the type of phone someone is using, which makes me take greater interest in which phone I am using. On the other hand, someone who never notices which phone or gadgets someone else is using is likely not going to think twice about which devices they use ("As long as I can call people, that's all that matters" types).

I would imagine that much of the self-esteem issues that some women face (though certainly faced by some men as well) are due to this comparison trap. Rather than it being media driven, it may be the result of they themselves overly focusing on how their peers look - and (often) inaccurately connecting their successes and elicited reactions to their appearances. In other words, "that guy is dating my friend - it must be because she is prettier than me." Is this phenomenon a flaw within the media, or is it rather an incorrect outlook possessed by individuals with self-esteem issues?

Because rationally, I think we can all agree that a happy and self-content individual (regardless of their societal measure of attractiveness), is always going to be happier and more fulfilled.

It also affects what men find sexually attractive to a significant degree, further fueling the press towards media representations of beauty.

I don't agree with this logic, because it assumes that men (as a group) are drawn to women purely based on sexual attraction - as if her other traits are devoid of consideration. While on a cursory level, sexual attraction may drive initial contact, I think most people (including the majority of confident women) realize that a healthy relationship is not purely driven by sexual attraction.

It is women with low self-esteem that take this approach, since they often incorrectly scapegoat their appearance when they are turned down by a man. In reality, the man may have simply felt he was a better fit with another woman due to compatibility, personality, or a litany of other factors. On the other hand, there are incredibly confident women in the world who don't incorrectly make assumptions like this. They accept themselves and don't assume that men are talking to them only for their appearance, and I commend them for this. They truly understand and accept themselves, and more often than not go on to live very self-content lives - and their significant others will be very lucky indeed.

I think this is interesting to explore from the individual point of view - of what is the driving motivation of someone who pursues "societal standards of beauty." Is it somehow an innate tendency to want to be beautiful in a way the society (media) defines? I tend to disagree with this idea.

I don't believe it's "innate" but rather an indoctrinated tendency, perhaps to be "normal". Basically, I feel that society/media plays a large part in programming people (young children especially) into seeing what is and what is not beautiful.

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Rather, I think many people who feel insecure about their appearance are actually themselves caught in a vicious cycle known as the comparison trap. You'll only feel insecure about things when you are actively setting those qualities as metrics of value. For example, I never notice what kind of shoes someone is wearing because it's not a priority for me, so I don't care about my shoes. On the other hand, another person may immediately notice someone's shoes during a conversation, and thus pay attention to the appearance of his/her shoes as well since it is a metric he/she pays attention to in others. As another example, I may pay a lot of attention to the type of phone someone is using, which makes me take greater interest in which phone I am using. On the other hand, someone who never notices which phone or gadgets someone else is using is likely not going to think twice about which devices they use ("As long as I can call people, that's all that matters" types).

I would imagine that much of the self-esteem issues that some women face (though certainly faced by some men as well) are due to this comparison trap. Rather than it being media driven, it may be the result of they themselves overly focusing on how their peers look - and (often) inaccurately connecting their successes and elicited reactions to their appearances. In other words, "that guy is dating my friend - it must be because she is prettier than me." Is this phenomenon a flaw within the media, or is it rather an incorrect outlook possessed by individuals with self-esteem issues?

Because rationally, I think we can all agree that a happy and self-content individual (regardless of their societal measure of attractiveness), is always going to be happier and more fulfilled.

This inadvertent push for perfection by media has a much larger effect on the young than the old, which is why this issue concerns me. Generally, by their twenties, most people have realized that while appearances are nice, they're far more likely to hook someone with a good time rather than a pretty face. The problems come when they're still young and are essentially taught to scrutinize every detail of themselves, a dangerous venture as NOBODY is perfect and if you look hard enough, you'll always see a bit of fat, or a blemish, or some other minor oddity.

I feel if we portray a much more natural beauty through media (an unlikely occurrence), we will teach children to be more happy with themselves and less prone to starting down a path which will only lead to depression.

With all this said and done, I feel the world has been gradually growing a bit more laid back as far as appearances are concerned, that or perhaps everyone is just that much more beautiful!